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Sociology of Justice

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Handbook of Social Justice Theory and Research

Abstract

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the empirical justice research done so far within sociology and aim to contribute to a clearer understanding of what constitutes a sociological approach. In order to do so, we first introduce the multilevel model of sociological explanation and derive four perspectives of sociological justice research: the analysis of institution Error! Bookmark not defined. s and discourses on the societal level and the analysis of attitudes and behavior on the individual level. As sociological attitude research is the field with the most advanced theories and the broadest stock of empirical findings, we will focus on such and report its central theoretical developments and main empirical results. We restrict our review to what is usually called “distributive justice” i.e., justice conceptions related to the allocation and distribution of goods (primarily income and wealth) and burdens (e.g., taxes or welfare payment).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For comprehensive overviews that also include procedural and interactional justice concerns, see Hegtvedt and Isom (2014), Hegtvedt (2006), Arts and van der Veen (1992), Cohen (1986).

  2. 2.

    The idea that moral beliefs and moral sentiments reflect the structural conditions of a particular society was originally formulated by Émile Durkheim. According to him, the task of sociology as a moral science was to study the different expressions of morality empirically and to show how they are affected by the structural conditions within a society. For Luhmann (1996), this entails the accurate observation of how and under what structural conditions moral and ethical questions are communicated within a society. The assumption is that there are correlations between the semantic forms of ethical reflections and the social structures of a society.

  3. 3.

    http://www.gallup.com/poll/161780/fewer-americans-view-income-taxes-fair.aspx.

  4. 4.

    At that time, questionnaire items on justice attitudes had already found their way into various national and international survey programs such as the General Social Survey and the International Social Survey Program.

  5. 5.

    One of the first empirical studies of the 1950s showed that employees reduced their quantitative and qualitative work effort if they considered their income to be unjustly low (Homans, 1953).

  6. 6.

    The analysis is based on data provided by the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In this ongoing longitudinal study, members of households are surveyed over several years. The question concerning justice of earnings has been included every 2 years since 2005. In the near future, it will be possible to investigate changes of justice attitudes over individuals’ lifetimes and to investigate the consequences of injustice as well as the determinants of justice (Sauer & Valet, 2013; Schunck, Sauer, & Valet, 2015).

  7. 7.

    To identify those individual or situational characteristics that are considered essential to just rewards or burdens, the factorial survey is increasingly the method of choice for sociological research on justice (Liebig, Sauer, & Friedhoff, 2015; Wallander, 2009).

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Acknowledgments

This chapter is an outcome of the research project “The Legitimation of Inequalities—Structural Conditions of Justice Attitudes over the Lifespan,” which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) 882 “From Heterogeneities to Inequalities” at Bielefeld University, Germany. The authors are indebted to Assaf Rotman, Clara Sabbagh, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments, critiques, and suggestions, and Rene Reinholz and William White for language editing.

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  1. Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Stefan Liebig & Carsten Sauer

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  1. Stefan Liebig
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Correspondence to Stefan Liebig .

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  1. University of Haifa Faculty of Education, Haifa, Israel

    Clara Sabbagh

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany

    Manfred Schmitt

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Liebig, S., Sauer, C. (2016). Sociology of Justice. In: Sabbagh, C., Schmitt, M. (eds) Handbook of Social Justice Theory and Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3216-0_3

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